9 Guitar Hero Autobiographies

Sex, drugs and hallucinating Predator

Slash - Slash

Whether he’s squirting arterial blood over Izzy Stradlin’s bathroom, firing a .44 Magnum throughhis ceiling, drunk- driving at 90mph or running naked across an Arizona golf course to escape his hallucinations of the alien from Predator, the mad hatter spares no details of his late- 80s smack habit. Oh, and he plays a bit of guitar, too.

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Ace Frehley – No Regrets

A toe-curling tragi-comedy in which the KISS Spaceman is punched out by promoters, catches pubic lice, slides into addiction cliché and celebrates his firing from the line-up with a car chase that ends with him spread-eagled at police gunpoint. No Regrets, Ace? Seriously...?

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Mick Mars – The Dirt

The Crüe’s ‘quiet one’ raises hell across Neil Strauss’s notorious tome, peaking when he roams the streets of Tokyo, blind-drunk, with his pants around his ankles, snapping at tourists in a Godzilla mask. “I thought I was so funny...” he cringes.

Kurt Cobain – Journals

Less memoir, more scrapbook, this posthumous 2002 release reproduces the scathing letters, embryonic lyrics and jet-black cartoons that Cobain scribbled on notebooks and hotel stationery as he neared his suicide.

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Gregg Allman – My Cross To Bear

By two, his father has been gunned down. By eight, he’s being beaten with coat hangers at military school. By the 70s, he’s bouncing between a smack habit and alcoholism, and mourning the fatal bike crash of brother Duane. Thankfully, Allman spins his yarn with the easy humour of a Southern barfly nursing a bottle of moonshine.

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Ronnie Wood – Ronnie

Anything Keef can do, Ron can do almost as well, and this 2007 memoir follows the Stones man from water-gypsy roots to standing on the world’s biggest stages, playing ‘spot the tits’. The only tragedy is that it was published before he started bedding the Russian cocktail waitresses...

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Sammy Hagar – Red

The Chickenfoot man is compelling on his “bone- f**king-poor” childhood and “alcoholic madman” father, but it’s his potshots at Eddie Van Halen that make Red a set text. “Hunched over like a little old man,” writes Hagar, “missing a number of teeth... he looked like he hadn’t bathed in a week.”

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Keith Richards – Life

The great Keef’s 2010 autobiography was miraculous for two reasons. First, because it finally lifted the lid on the antics of rock’s gold-standard rogue, following him through a lifetime of heroin binges, mafia run-ins, court cases, punch-ups and arson, with frequent asides on the size of Mick Jagger’s tackle. And second, because the sozzled Stone was actually able to remember it.